DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals

"Two weeks ago today we published our initial response to the John Bohannon 'sting' article published in Science Magazine. Our response came a day after the article's embargo broke, while Twitter, blogs and news sites were excitedly discussing the article's implications, the shortcomings of its methodology, and the failings (sometimes hypocrisy) of Science Magazine itself. Two weeks later and the article is still being tweeted and even other journals have jumped on the bandwagon. In the way of responses to the article, there have been many. While Science and the article's author remained relatively silent and haven't directly answered criticisms, well-known voices in support of open access all stepped forward: Björn Brembs, Mike Taylor, Steve Harnad, Michael Eisen, Peter Suber, to name but a few. Many of the responses, all well-worth a read, are collected in Mike Taylor's post in his SV-POW blog. Unfortunately, within 35 minutes of embargo being lifted, Bohannon's article had already done its damage. DOAJ was monitoring tweets and saw phrases such as: "shoddy standards", "little or no scrutiny at OA journals", "we knew peer-review was broken, and here's proof". The second phrase, along with the 'Wild West' term that Science included in its press release, reoccurred in tweets again and again. Bohannon's article did highlight three important issues: There are predatory publishers. There are problems with peer review. Some of the exposed journals are indexed in DOAJ. Enough has been said by many on the first two points and the 'revelations' exposed by Bohannon's article add nothing new to either. Thankfully, we have the likes of OASPA (www.oaspa.org) who work hard to establish best practice among open access publishers in both these areas. OASPA posted their statement on 4th October clearly reminding us that they already have controls in place to monitor best practice ... So to the third point. Some of the exposed journals are indexed in the DOAJ. How will DOAJ tackle this list of journals - made available here by Science and Bohannon - who accepted the fake article for publication?  Firstly, it should be noted that Bohannon created his list back in June 2012 and certainly there had been changes to some of the journals' statuses since then. DOAJ's own study of the list immediately revealed that 10 of the journals had already been removed from the Directory, as part of our regular and continuous review process. DOAJ decided that the remaining journals would also be removed from the Directory as quickly as possible and an email sent to each, explaining why this has been done. This process was completed on Tuesday 15th October. This and our regular continuous review process mean we have removed 114 journals during the last week.  There is one final point that DOAJ would like to make, one that we feel may have been overlooked by the majority. To carry out his exercise, as well as cooking up fake scientific papers and persistently pushing journals into accepting them, Bohannon also needed to create fake authors. We are wondering why he felt that the paper's authors had to have names hailing from the African continent? As one comment on the SV-POW post said:  'This is a great example of smash and grab, sensationalist journalism that leaves collateral damage everywhere. I am offended at his method of creating fake authors and institutions hailing from the African continent by jumbling up initials and using African place names. Imagine if he’d chosen China or Japan?' [1]  Quite. What does Bohannon's choice of names for his fake authors imply? That we should mistrust all researchers submitting work from the African continent? Or perhaps, simply that research from the African continent is of poor quality in general? Either way, DOAJ is disheartened by this approach since for many years and along with numerous organisations (for example INASP, Research4Life, Redalyc) DOAJ has been doing so much to promote scholarly excellence and give visibility to academic publications from the non-Western world. Bohannon's approach hints at a much-blinkered outlook on academic publishing: rather than 'Wild West', it's the West is best! DOAJ wonders if this approach is much far removed from the unfunny joke that the summer intern from the American news channel played on his colleagues by concocting fake - and racist - names for the Asiana 214 pilots? Are Bohannon's name inventions much better? The authors could just as well have been named Chuck Jones Jr, Gunther von Leiderhosen, Jean-Michel Leclerc or Sir Henry Postlethwaite."